How did DOD grant such top security clearance to such a low ranking airman?
DOD is in a CYA mode. Congress and the public must hold their feet to the fire. It’s time to re-organize an organization gotten to big, fat, careless and clumsy. They need to be lean and mean!!!
It looks to me like the DOD or whichever agency created a system containing important state secrets that could be exploited by a 21 year old airman. The 21 airman may have criminally downmloaded the documents (innocent until proven guilty). Now they are scapegoating the airman when the system, as designed, is unsecure.
“How did DOD grant such top security clearance to such a low ranking airman?”
Rank has nothing to do with a security clearance. The job has everything to do with it. As a Private E2 I had a Top Secret/Crypto clearance in the Army. All my co-workers of equal rank held the same clearance. In that era anyone that had any chance at all of going near COMSEC/SIGSEC material had to have top clearance.
If you were an Air Force Cryptographic Maintenance Technician (306x0) in the 80’s, you had almost all the tickets and got the briefings that existed in addition to the Top Secret clearance. Pretty much the keys to the candy store. If assigned to the DC area, you had to be approved to be in the PRP (Personnel Reliability Program). It was an enlisted specialty and the ranks went from E-2 to E-9. No one was E-1 (Airman Basic) because that was only for six months and by the time you got out of Tech school, you would have had that much time in or more when you got to your first assignment.
The solution they’re offering right now is to expand monitoring of social media and chat rooms. See how that works? More spying on Americans is what needed.